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In the history of Romanian philosophy, philosophical systems and projects first appeared in the second half of the 19th century. In the first part of this paper, I will try to show that the general context of Western philosophy at that time was no longer favourable to this kind of philosophizing, and then to show that this negative attitude was not a major impediment, as at the same time many authors argued that the systematic ideal is part of the very nature of philosophical endeavour. In the second part of the paper, I will very briefly review the main philosophical systems published in Romania against this background, arguing that they should not be seen as anachronistic but, following an idea of Collingwood, they must be understood as expressions of the very nature of the philosophical way of thinking.
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This paper proposes some theoretical instruments for understanding the “historical promises” made by some modern philosophers of history. In our sense of the term, these “historical promises” refer to a desired future state of humanity/society, but insofar as it is related to a particular description of past historical development. The paper puts forth a hypothesis about how we should understand the notion of historical necessity involved in these promises and analyzes the three main discursive strategies that make up a promise. It then goes on to depict five successive waves of modern philosophical promises based on the previously identified categories.
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The theology of alpha privative flourishes in the late Hellenistic thinking. Aristotle identifies the use of the alpha privative with the logic of privation, and this is the place where the negative theology begins, despite the refusal of Late Platonism to associate the notion of steresis with via negativa. The “apohatic” will eventually be contrasted with the “steretic”, but this distinction is not as clearly emphasized in Aristotle: „Privation (steresis) has as many meanings as there are negations (apophasis) by the alpha privative” (Metaphysics 1022b33). It is noticeable that the privation is equaled with a form of negation, and the alpha privative is included in the logic of privation. In Dionysius we have the first clear tendency to limit privation to the ontological spectrum. The key sequence is the one in the Mystical theology IV, where the “Cause of all” is not and does not contain “alteration, destruction, privation, diminution, or anything else which pertains to what is sensed”. In this context, privation explicitly addresses the sensible world and is associated with various concepts which denote the change of state.
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In this paper, I deal with the issue realityfiction from the following perspective: substantial forms appear in some of Leibniz's writings as a part of a substantial whole, and in others as the whole as such; more precisely, the souls is both the form and the substance. In the first part of the paper, I give an historical presentation, in the second and third parts, I focus on the influence that Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas had on Leibniz, and in the last part, I will present, briefly, a solution for the problem I raised in the beginning of the study.
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In his Commentary of Plato’s Parmenides (In Platonis Parmenidem VI), Proclus analyzes the state of the negations which express transcendence. Transcendence understood as negation implies the suppression of all the attributes circumscribed to being. At the end of our dialectical approach to reach the One through negation, we must abandon all inquiry, all questioning, all knowledge and its instruments, all discourse – even if it is entirely a negative discourse. In fact, the entire dialectical method, even if it operates by „way of negations”, is nothing but a preamble to the mystical union, removing whatever impedes the contemplation of the One. “It is with silence, then, that he brings to the completion the study of the One” (In Platonis Parmenidem VII).
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Despite the last decades’ growing interest in discussing Cicero’s philosophical works there is still no consensus among scholars regarding the purposes these works were written for. In this article, by focusing on some fragments from works like the ‚Hortensius‛ and ‚Consolatio‛, I will try to offer new grounds for reading and interpreting Cicero not only as a philosopher of public and political affairs, as he is usually seen by modern scholars, but also as a philosopher of the theoretical life.
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Freedom is that state of the individual in which he is not affected by constraints and in which he can choose without external influence, that is, he can do what he wants. Although we would be tempted to believe that both Spinoza and Descartes have a common vision of freedom and free will, since they both have the same starting point: they both accept the identity between the free will and the knowledge of God. But unlike Descartes, Spinoza is tempted to grant the primacy of knowledge.
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Many aesthetic lecturers feel that the subject of their lectures is not so much aesthetics as the history of aesthetics, the aesthetic views of Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, Hume and Burke, British philosophers of taste and German romantics. Does this mean that aesthetics is nourished by its own past, nourished by reinterpretations of its classics, defends concepts and categories that no longer inspire anyone? Don’t they open up new cognitive perspectives? Does this mean that aesthetics is dead today, like Latin or Sanskrit, and that its vision of art and beauty is outdated, out of date and completely useless? Stefan Morawski in the introduction to the anthology Twilight of Aesthetics – Alleged or Authentic? he wrote that he did not know the history of aesthetic thought that would begin in the eighteenth century with Baumgarten. Today we can meet with such an approach more and more often. Many authors assume that in the second half of the 18th century, modern aesthetics was born as a science of senses, how our higher (sight, hearing) and lower senses (taste, smell, touch) contribute to our knowledge of the world. In the introduction to the anthology cited here, Stefan Morawski divides the history of aesthetics into four periods of unequal length. The Morawski diagram seems to be a convenient starting point for defining the changing object of aesthetics. The first of the periods distinguished by Morawski is the longest one, lasting from Ancient Greece to Enlightenment, can be called the history of aesthetic thought, the second is philosophical aesthetics, the third is a time of emancipation and institutionalization of aesthetics as autonomous discipline, and the fourth period leads beyond the limits of classical aesthetics.
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There is some debate among interpreters of Aquinas as to whether he attributed a doctrine of creation to Plato and Aristotle. Mark Johnson has noted many texts where Aquinas does appear to attribute to Plato and Aristotle an understanding of creation. Yet, an initial glance at Summa Theologiae I.44.2 would suggest he did not. This paper first examines what various interpreters of Aquinas have had to say on the matter. Secondly, it argues that Summa Theologiae I.44.2, taken in context with the proceeding article and De Potentia III.5, need not be read as denying such a doctrine to Plato and Aristotle. Thirdly, this paper concludes that because Plato and Aristotle do not actually possess doctrines of creation, they cannot be the chief sources for Aquinas’ own thought on this matter. Instead, to attribute creation to Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas interprets them through Avicenna. Thus, Avicenna is the chief source for Aquinas’ understanding of creation.
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Thomistic metaphysics has been challenged on the grounds that its principles are inconsistent with our experiences of divine action and of our own subjectivity. Challenges of this sort have been raised by Eastern Christian thinkers in the school of Gregory Palamas and by contemporary Personalists; they propose alternative metaphysics to explain these experiences. Against these objections and against those Thomists who hold that Thomas Aquinas’ claims exclude Byzantine and Personalist metaphysics, I argue that Thomas’ metaphysical principles already have “flexibility” built into them, such that they can accommodate ways that reality is given in experience, which Thomas did not consider. I argue for this claim using the work of Byzantine and Personalist Thomists, and especially of Jacques Maritain, who outlines several ways in which Thomistic metaphysical principles can be expanded to explain experiences that he did not consider.
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While the Catholic intellectual tradition upholds the uniqueness of humans, much contemporary scientific research has come to the opposing conclusion that humans are not significantly different from other animals. To engage in robust dialogue around the question of human uniqueness, we utilize Aquinas’s model of disputatio to focus on an attribute of human beings that is unexplored in the literature – namely, the human capacity to garden – and address five scientific and philosophical objections to our position that the capacity to garden makes humans distinct. Engaging with various branches of science, we demonstrate that human capacities and modes of gardening are not only incrementally different, but also fundamentally different in kind, from those of nonhuman creatures. Philosophically, we utilize the power-object model of division and Aristotle’s categorization of knowledge to express the difference in kind between human beings and other animals. These responses allow us to set aside each major objection.
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According to Immanuel Kant the philosophy of religion is based on purely a reasonable justification of the postulates of freedom, immortality and God. He reached the conclusion that they are the concepts contained 'a priori' in the mind, therefore he gave them a practical application through the universal moral law. He went beyond the cultic understanding of religion by introducing the religion of morality. Thus, he saw in Christianity naturalism, which contains eternal and unchanging moral laws; however, Kant rejected anything that was related to church services. His religion is purely reasonable and therefore needs only argumentation distinctive to the philosophy of the Enlightenment.
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Bertrand Russell’s On Denoting, published in 1905, is a classic text of logic. In this study Russell presented his theory of descriptions, and underscored its importance not just in the fields of logic and mathematics, but also in the field of the theory of knowledge. My paper is a short presentation of Russell’s theory with the help of first-order logic.
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The paper analyzes the texts of a Russian anthroposophist, painter, and writer Margarita Sabashnikova related to the life and work of Meister Eckhart and Mikhail Lomonosov. The study demonstrates how Sabashnikova interprets the two important thinkers from the perspective of Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy in order to prepare Sabashnikova’s Russian readers for the coming epoch of world history, in which (according to Steiner) Russia plays a key role. For Sabashnikova, Eckhart is an ideal spiritual teacher and a person whose life marked the beginning of a new period of history, while Lomonosov is presented as an ideal follower who should become a model for all spiritual representatives not only of Russian intelligentsiya of that time.
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I start the analysis with probably the strongest historiography of progress—the Hegelian philosophy. Then I discuss the dynamics of the “conceptual engine” of the theory of pro-gress in Hegel—the concept of sublation. This analysis will make apparent that the Hegelian approach gives us not only a general “historiosophy” of progress, but above all a precise conceptual—even logical— tool, engine, device; thus pro-ductively mediatizing contradictions and conditioning the possibility of progress as such. In search of the general “historiography” of regress, I then turn towards psychoanaly-tical theory. In the psychoanalytical horizon of Freud and Lacan, I introduce a conceptual instrument forged on the basis of the Hegelian sublation—the concept of de-sublation. It will appear as the sought after “conceptual device” of the general theory of regress. We will see how the de-sublation of the previously sublated whole produces two independent conceptual entities, gathered around the moments of the universal and the singular.
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In this paper I will limit myself to dealing with an issue that seems particularly overlooked in the debate about Plato and Popper, namely that of political change. I will focus on this question by trying to challenge the assumption that has remained largely unchallenged until now, namely that modern liberal democracy can play the role of the general standard against which we can judge the thinkers of the past. In fact, I will show how, in the Open Society, liberal democracy sets the limits of what counts as “rational” political change, revealing that Popper has a teleological conception of historical development.Furthermore, I will suggest a different interpretation of Plato’s approach to the question of political change, arguing against Popper’s claim that the ultimate goal of the utopian city in the Republic is to eliminate change, by reverting to tribalism. As I will try to show, Plato’s utopian construction gives us some better tools than Popper’s framework for thinking about change in politics.
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In this paper I will limit myself to dealing with an issue that seems particularly overlooked in the debate about Plato and Popper, namely that of political change. I will focus on this question by trying to challenge the assumption that has remained largely unchallenged until now, namely that modern liberal democracy can play the role of the general standard against which we can judge the thinkers of the past. In fact, I will show how, in the Open Society, liberal democracy sets the limits of what counts as «rational» political change, revealing that Popper has a teleological conception of historical development.Furthermore, I will suggest a different interpretation of Plato’s approach to the question of political change, arguing against Popper’s claim that the ultimate goal of the utopian city in the Republic is to eliminate change, by reverting to tribalism. As I will try to show, Plato’s utopian construction gives us some better tools than Popper’s framework for thinking about change in politics.
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The aim of this article is to show the extent to which Józef Tischner’s Historia filozofii po góralsku (The History of Philosophy, Highlander Style) is a cognitively aractive source of learning about Podhale’s dialect and culture and the possible threats or difficulties that may be associated with using the work to this end. The author begins his discussions by considering such features of the work under examination as its apocryphal and fairy-tale-like nature and proceeds to showing it on three different planes. From the linguistic perspective, he notes the dialectal features characteristic of the work in terms of phonetics, inflection, syntax, word formation, lexis, and phraseology. In terms of cultural studies, he devotes his aention to the customs and traditions of the Podhale region as well as to the regional cuisine, which found their places in individual stories. In some of the considerations focused to a greater extent on philosophy, the author indicates the characteristic features of the highlander worldview, which Tischner captures in his work, and conducts the word-formation and semantic analysis of selected neologisms and neosemantisms, which were used by the author of the stories to enrich the highlanders’ speech with philosophical terminology.
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